Last Day - Thursday, October 9

12PM

In order to accomodate the dancers who are trying to work as we film, we've agreed during the previous two nights to wait until the last hour of the night before shooting at the main stage. The problem is, by midnight on a Tuesday all the patrons have cleared out and our extras aren't enough to fill out the club. Michael has invited a few of his friends to help us populate the club, and Bella offered to be on the schedule for the night, giving us ten minutes an hour to shoot onstage. Bella's also working the day shift, so I use this as an opportunity to grab a daytime shot of Nikki entering the club.

About five minutes from the club, my car starts stuttering and fishtailing - I make it to the club and guess, correctly, that a wheel bearing has kicked the bucket. Jimmy is kind enough to use his AAA membership to cover the tow, and Bella offers me her car to return to Berkshire County and collect cast and props for tonight. The club is still dead and I'm waiting for the tow to arrive, so Bella and I get a chance to hang out and talk for a while, not about the movie but about family, marriage and whatnot. We've been making the movie at such a breakneck pace that we've hardly been able to get to know each other, and I'm almost glad the wheel bearing gave me the opportunity - one of my goals in making the film was to make some new friends, and I now have a great friend in Bella. Eventually, the tow arrives, and I race back to pick everyone up and return for our last night.

6PM

We get through the first few scenes easily - by now, everyone has comfortably settled into their characters. The results are sometimes surprising, as when Sasha plays an emotional scene very quiet and internal, with stronger emotional impact then if she'd gone for tears and volume. Others, like a scene from the opening between Bella, Michael and KT, are just a pleasure to watch the actors play off each other. While I'd always imagined myself as a perfectionist willing to do 50 takes if needed to get the scene, I could not have anticipated how prepared my cast would be - we're averaging about four takes per setup. For a final night of shooting, the mood is surprisingly leisurely, and though I'm astounded that things have gone so well on such a short shooting schedule, I feel a bit sad that we're wrapping just as we're hitting our stride.

After a few mostly Alice-free nights, it's nice to have Jess back; while the club is an interesting setting and everyone is doing a great job, it's the relationship between Nikki and Alice that has become the most interesting aspect of the film for me. We're preparing to shoot a scene where Alice gives Nikki a prehistoric tooth when we realize we've all forgotten about the prop. Jess and I are scrambling to find a substitute gift when Bella informs me that Autumn Forever (our still photographer) collects animal bones and teeth, and probably has some in her car.

"We're all set," I tell Jess. "Autumn has bones and teeth in her car."

"Come again?"

"Autumn has bones and teeth in her car."

We've done two takes of Nikki's opening dance at this point, and are preparing for the third. The scene is scored with "Doomed From the Get Go," a loud, abrasive and aggressively sexual blast of punk from RI band Midnight Creeps. I think it'll open the film with a bang; when I play it for Bella, she says "Well, that wasn't what I was expecting, but it's your movie." The first take focuses on Nikki from offstage, the second follows her around the stage and focuses on the customers. For the third, I want the camera onstage with Bella - it's important that we get Nikki's point of view, otherwise the scene is pure exploitation (which I'm not totally against, but it's not what I'm going for here). The third take might be the most fun I've had on the whole shoot - dancing in my own awkward way opposite Bella, ducking and bobbing and sidestepping to get as close as possible while still accounting for the club's many mirrors. Directing, for me, is happiest when it's an active, physical experience, and while in this case it means revealing to a roomful of people just how uncoordinated I am, Jess is nice enough to assure me that it was entertaining to watch.

The rest of the night is devoted to the script's final fifteen pages, so I apologize in advance for my vagueness. A personal highlight: the ending involves Alice carrying around a bottle of whiskey. Before one scene, we realize that the bottle, by this point, should be half-empty. The cast and crew are taking careful sips when I have an uncharacteristically cocky moment. I don't drink much, and though I don't mean to make it sound like the Apocalypse Now shoot or anything, there has certainly been a good deal of rowdiness happening on the periphery of the Black Light set while I've been stuck in the role of stern taskmaster. The hell with it, I think to myself, as I take an unreasonably long swallow from the bottle. I hear Jess, Bella and others exclaim "DON'T!" as I take a deep breath, repress the urge to vomit, and announce that we're moving on. I cannot lie - the next few scenes were the easiest to direct in the entire shoot. I find myself making decisions quickly and with authority, and when I look at the footage later, it's surprisingly strong. I think to myself, maybe I should always direct drunk, and before the thought is finished, I have a vision of myself, middle-aged and paunchy, wearing aviator sunglasses and a bandana, slumped over in a director's chair, playing with a knife and grumbling "Let's fuckin' shoot this shit!" Maybe not.

A half-hour later I'm back to normal (secret superpower: I have a Schindler-like tolerance for alcohol) and we're at the last scene. When I finished the first draft, I thought to myself, "If anything works in this script, it's the last scene." So, of course, the overwhelmingly positive response I got from my friends was met with near-unanimous confusion about the last scene. If you're reading this after seeing Black Light and wondering how any director could drop the ball so badly, it's because I stuck to my guns. But no matter what other ideas I entertained, this ending is the only one that made emotional sense to me; I hope people enjoy the movie, but either way, the movie is true to my experience and understanding, and regardless of its success or failure, I can live with that.

And now that we're at the final scene, I think everyone is absorbing the feeling behind it. I'd chosen a song for the scene called If There's No Light, by the Vermont group Pretend You're Happy. I'd been worried it might be too earnest, too heart-on-its-sleeve for most people, so naturally, everyone thinks it's perfect. I can't wait to talk about this scene and what Jess, Bella and everyone else brought to it; suffice to say, for now, that they Chrissied it. When I call cut there are hugs and squeals of excitement, the pride of accomplishment and the relief that we actually did it mixed with the bittersweet awareness that tomorrow we'll all go our separate ways. We tried to make something honest, something we could all share, and for a moment, we did capture life as it should be and lived in it, for a moment, before reality took over again. I hope that when the movie is released into the world and out of my control, it'll reach the people it's meant for and they can join us in that moment. But for now, Black Light is a wrap.